 Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the Vosilicast podcast, hosted at podfeed.com. A technology podcast that's ever so slight, Apple bias. Today is Sunday, June 18th, 2023, and this is show number 945. Well, Steve and I are actually in Houston right now to visit our son Kyle and his family. So this entire show was prerecorded without the live audience before we left. You know how lonely I find that to be, but it's more fun to be with my grandchildren. So, sorry about that. We'll see you next week in the live show. We start with another quick review of a gadget from Marty Sobo, and then I'll step in and explain how to make a virtual switch to control automations in HomeKit. George from Tulsa is back after a bit of a hiatus with a couple of products that make computing more accessible to him. Finally, in a rare appearance, Steve Sheridan joins me to explain why electric vehicles range is so much more affected by things like wind and towing than gas cars are. Let's go ahead and get started with Marty Sobo. Hey all, Marty here. Today we're gonna be talking about the Anker 733 two-in-one wall charger. On the front, you have one USB-A and two USB-C ports. This also has a 10 milliamp battery built right into it. This is awesome because you can plug this thing in, plug your devices in, and you get all your devices all charged up, plus the battery inside gets fully charged up. You take this with you, and if you need to charge your devices throughout the day, then you have that built in. Also, this has a really cool flip wall plug built right into it. When you use it, you just flip the plug up and plug it in, and when you're done, you pull it out and flip the plug down, and it just hides neatly right into the device. I would definitely recommend having USB-C to lightning, for example, if you have an iPhone, or being able to have any USB-C cables as that will charge in fast charge mode. So that's really cool to be able to have those options. The device is not that heavy. You can easily toss it in any go bag without issue. The average price for this device is around $100. But if you think about it, you're getting a wall charger, fast charging, as well as a battery all built into one device. So that's pretty cool. And that's the Anker 733 2-in-1 wall charger. Enjoy. Well, thanks, Marty. This looked like a really terrific device, so I took a deeper look at it, and I want to add a few more details for the nocella castaways. The Anker 733 can provide 65 watts of power, which is enough to charge a laptop, but the entire device provides 65 watts. That means if you want to charge a laptop, you can use just one USB-C port and nothing else while charging that laptop. As you add more devices, the 65 watts starts to get split up between the ports. For example, if you use one USB-C port and one USB-A port, the C port gets 45 watts and the A gets 20 watts. This is very common in this kind of charger, but I wanted you to know that it can charge a laptop when plugged into the wall if it has just one of the ports being used. When it's in battery mode and unplugged from the wall, the three USB ports all provide only 18 watts combined, which is too low for laptop charging. On the Amazon page I linked to, Anker have a good graphic you can flip through that shows you just how much power you could get from the device depending on which ports you're using and whether it's plugged into the wall. The other thing I wanted to mention is that there's a power button to wake up the charger and it has four lights on it to indicate charge level. Marty mentioned that it wasn't very heavy, so I looked it up and it's 11 ounces or around 300 grams. Thanks so much for the review. This looks like a great device for the go bag. Like many no-cellic-aster ways, Steve and I use HomeKit to control our smart devices. While we can do a lot of what we want, it's often clumsy and we get really tangled in the terminology. The solution to this problem is obvious. Add more automation. All right, let's set up the problem Steve and I were trying to solve. And as I explained how I solved it, I'll try to broaden the description to be more applicable to problems you may run into with HomeKit automation. At Casa Sheridan, we have a gas water heater and the water is plumbed such that it takes forever for the hot water to get to the kitchen and our main bathroom. May have heard that water is an extremely rare and precious resource in California, so running the water for say two minutes just to get it hot enough to take a shower is incredibly wasteful. In 2015, we installed a hot water recirculation pump. I wrote it up in an article called Saving Water in California with a Hot Water Recirculation Pump. The basic idea of the pump is that using sensors at the distant sinks, it senses when the water gets below a temperature threshold and then it pumps water from the water heater into the hot water line. This solves the problem of wasting water but it wastes electricity for this pump to constantly push hot water out to the sinks, say, while we're sleeping or unlikely to require hot water. To solve the problem we created with the pump, Steve put it on a smart switch and only has the pump turn on during specific hours of the day. He has it set to go on in the morning where we're getting ready for the day, again during lunchtime for doing dishes, during dinner for the same reason and finally at bedtime for our evening ablutions. This all works great and I'll explain how it's done in a moment but now to add the problem to be solved. When we go on vacation, Steve doesn't wanna waste any electricity needlessly pumping water around the house when we're not even there. In HomeKit, he has to manually disable each of the automations for the morning, noon, evening and nighttime settings. Yes, we're too lazy to toggle four switches in an app and toggle them back when we get home. We'd rather spend say four or five hours trying to make it be only one toggle switch. To bring this to a more generic problem description, if you have multiple automations in HomeKit that you'd like to disable with a single flip of a switch, this article might help. So to get us all on the same page, let's walk through the terminology HomeKit uses because it does get confusing. First you've got devices. So this is switches, plugs, lights, garage door, butters, motion sensors and more and devices can be named. Then you have scenes. Scenes are one or more devices in defined states. For example, a scene could be the garage door is closed, the living room light is on and the switch controlling the ceiling fan is on. Scenes can also be named. Then we have events and events are triggers for automation. The only type of events you get are time of day and accessories turned on or off, people arrive or leave or a sensor detects something. So those are events. Finally, you've got automations. These are devices or scenes that are triggered by events. Okay, so a device might be a light switch and the event could be somebody arrived home, the light switch turns on, that's an automation. All right, now that we've got our terminology down, let's talk about my specifics. We have a scene called WH on, which is simply the switch for the water heater pump is turned on, so WH on. We have a second scene called imaginatively WH off, which turns to switch off so the pump does not run. And remember, a scene is just a state for one or more devices. When Steve set up the four times a day we wanted the pump switch turned on, he used an automation. As I mentioned, automations are triggered by events and the event he used was the time of day. While he could have created eight automations, four to turn the switch on at a specific time and four to turn it off some number of hours later, there's an easier way. In automations, you can tell HomeKit to trigger at a time of day and to turn off after a specific number of hours or even minutes. He was able to have the water heater pump turn on and off four times with four automations instead of eight. Now the problem with this flawless design is that when we go on vacation, Steve has to launch the Home app, tap on automations and open each of the four time-based water heater pump automations one by one to disable them. It was tedious and annoying. I decided to figure out a way to make this a more automated process. I just assumed there was a way to do this in HomeKit or in the worst possible case, I would have to go to shortcuts. I poked around in the Home app and I couldn't find anything. And as usual, I failed to figure it out in shortcuts. To date, I have successfully made, I think it's one shortcut that I actually use and I think I actually borrowed that from somebody on the internet. Anyway, the next obvious thing to do when you fail at something like this is to ask on social media. I posted in the pod feed Slack and on Mastodon. I got several responses all telling me it can't be done. When you hear can't be done and shortcuts in the same sentence, the only thing you can do now is to turn to Rosemary Orchard who is an absolute wizard at shortcuts. I posted a question to her on Mastodon and I asked, is there a way to create a shortcut to disable multiple automations at once in HomeKit? And she replied, it would be through using a dummy switch in HomeKit and converting those automations to shortcuts which check that switch. While the brevity of messages in Mastodon did not allow for a lot of detail, she did give me enough descriptive words to start Googling for what she meant. The words I started searching for were dummy switch and converting automations to shortcuts. A dummy switch is a physical switch that you will dedicate to the job of toggling all of the automations you want on and off. Now if you're a semi-normal person, you should stop here and skip over the next part of what I'm going to explain. If you're a normal person, you wouldn't be here in the first place, right? But if you're semi-normal, what I've just said is enough. You should just buy a spare physical switch that's HomeKit compatible. Say like the Maros two-pack smart Wi-Fi plug mini for 20 bucks. After you get it set up in HomeKit, you can name it something like vacation. But if you're way past normal and you wanna learn an even nerdier way to do it, it turns out you can create a virtual switch using HomeBridge. If you haven't heard of HomeBridge, it's a tool you install on any computer that's on all the time in your house. You can use anything from a Raspberry Pi to a Mac to a PC to a server like a Synology. HomeBridge allows you to install plugins that make non-HomeKit compatible devices show up in HomeKit. I already have HomeBridge running on my Synology that allows me to bring my ring cameras into HomeKit so I was up for this virtual switch fun. I launched HomeBridge from my web browser, did a plug-in search for dummy switch and found something called HomeBridge-dummy. And it was a plug-in with 2,000 downloads. There were other ones, but I liked the 2,000 downloads kind of number where you think that's the main one. After I installed the plug-in, I found a button that said to add an accessory. That sounded good. It let me name it, so I called it vacation. And then I noticed a box that said stateful. So I checked that box because that means the switch will remain on instead of being automatically turned off. I have no idea why you'd wanna switch to automatically turn itself off, but if you're using this HomeBridge plug-in, make sure you check that box for stateful. Now, I wish these switches weren't called dummy switches, but I haven't been able to find a better term. My dummy switch happens to be a virtual switch, so I'll use that term for mine. As soon as I had my virtual switch in HomeBridge, it showed up in the Home app as a physical switch called vacation. Okay, the nerd alert is over. Whether you have a physical switch dedicated to the vacation task or a virtual switch during the job, we're ready for step two. Now, I originally assumed that the Shortcuts app would do this automation for us, but I looked up this convert to shortcut term and I found out it's a function buried inside the Home app. It's not available in shortcuts. On iOS, because it doesn't work properly on the Mac version of Home, it's an option that you'll only see when you create a new automation. Now, you might think that convert to shortcut would be for existing automations, but you would be wrong. Now, I learned everything I know about convert to shortcut by a fantastic guy on YouTube named Shane Watley. In his video, HomeKit Automations, Convert to Shortcut, he carefully and yet succinctly walks you through why you'd wanna do this and demonstrates a few scenarios. He does a great job, and if this intrigues you, I highly recommend watching his video. I'm gonna try to do the subject justice, but I don't think it'll come close to Shane's video because you can follow along and see exactly how he's doing it. All right, we're gonna have to create our automations using this magical convert to shortcut concept. Remember, I've already created a scene called WH on, which is simply the switch for the water heater pump in the on state. Since I only have that one smart switch inside this scene, I really could have used the smart switch itself, but it turns out that having a scene makes it adaptable for future things to be added to the scene. And it also makes the shortcut more readable. So remember, I had four automations before. I'm gonna have to recreate all four of them because you can't convert ones you already have. Now in the end, I'll have eight, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. We'll create a new automation by clicking the plus button in the upper right in Home and choosing an event to trigger the automation. I'm using a time of day occurs as my event trigger. At this point, you're offered scenes and accessories to automate. Do not choose a scene or accessory to automate. Instead, scroll down to the very bottom of this list of scenes and accessories and that's where you'll see the button that says convert to shortcut. I mean, totally intuitive. I can't believe you never noticed it or figured out what it did. Okay, you'll now enter the lovely world of shortcuts, but it's not exactly shortcuts. It appears to be a small subset of shortcuts, but it has the shortcuts we need. For us to have a single switch to flip that disables four automations, we need to create some logic. Now it's competent to create something like an if then else kind of condition in programming. Apple uses a slightly different terminology. They use if, otherwise, and if. Same thing. All right, we want to tell our shortcut that if the vacation switch is turned off, go ahead and run the automations to turn the water heater pump on. Otherwise, meaning vacation is on, then set the water heater pump to off. When many shortcuts opens, you'll see it already has one command, set scenes and accessories. We'll be using it in a moment, but first we need to add the logic steps. Creating the logic is actually super easy. In the search bar at the bottom, just type if. And when the option shows up, double tap it and we'll drop in three commands, if, otherwise, and end if. Remember I said that the shortcut will be pre-populated with a single command to set scenes and accessories? We want to move that down into the if conditional statement. We also need a second set command for the otherwise condition. So it's gonna be if, do this to the scene or accessory, otherwise do this. You could search for set in the search bar to add a second set command, but Shane taught me a much easier way. If you tap on the little icon on the left of a command, you get a menu and duplicate as an option. Now you can drag the duplicate under the otherwise condition. Duplicating commands like this is a huge time saver, but make sure you duplicate the commands before you assign anything to them or you can only duplicate it with those changes already made. Rather than go through the details of how to edit the shortcut steps, which you can learn from people much more qualified than me, I put a screenshot in the show notes of my final shortcut that is very simple to read and does what I described. It simply says, if vacation is off, set WH on. Otherwise set WH off, followed by that end if statement. Remember I said earlier that using a scene for the water heater pump switch was more readable than if I'd address the switch directly? In the screenshot, you can see the words set WH on where WH on is the scene that I described. If I directly address the switch, it would have just shown the name of the switch. I'd have to tap into the switch name to find out which state I'd told it to be in, on or off. So if you name your scene with the state of the devices, it'll help you know which state you've described in that set step without having to dive down into it. I mentioned earlier that I created four of these for the four times a day, we want the water heater pump to turn on. But I also told you I had to make eight automations. I only had four before we started with this vacation nonsense, so why would that be? When we originally created our four time-based automations to control the water heater pump, we were able to not only turn the device on at a specific time, but also to turn it off after a specific lapse time. However, with convert to shortcut automations, you don't get that option. So we had to create four regular automations to tell the four shortcut automations to stop. Since these four automations are all telling the switch for the water heater pump to turn off at a certain time, we don't need the vacation switch to also tell it to turn off, because they're already turning off, so they don't need any shortcuts logic. They were very simple to create. Even though this creates a lot of automations, they're actually very clear and easy to understand at a glance when you see the list. Now Steve was enamored enough with our vacation switch for the water heater pump that he applied what I'd learned to the water cooler. Think sparklets, but it's a different brand. The water cooler is also on a smart switch and goes on in the morning and off at night every day. A lot less complex, but yet another thing Steve has to disable manually when we go on vacation. In just a couple of minutes, he was able to recreate the automation to turn the water cooler on with logic from convert to shortcuts to let it happen only if the vacation switch was off. He's very happy now and was very excited to try the vacation switch on the two trips we have planned in the next couple of weeks. Now I'm starting to think that my core competency, my niche in the tech world is finding incredibly complicated ways to solve very silly little problems. Well, that's definitely true. I enjoyed the heck out of this whole process. I enjoyed learning how to make a virtual switch and how a dummy switch, if you forget the term, can allow you to control the super secret convert to shortcut menu. While a physical switch would be less nerd work and quite satisfying to push when you leave the home on vacation to trigger your automations, we can turn on vacation mode in our house remotely. And we saved about $10. Hi, I'm George from Tulsa, a longtime listener and once upon a time, a frequent contributor. As regular listeners know, Allison is an effective and passionate advocate for assistive technologies that enable those with visual auditory and physical challenges to enrich their lives through computing. She's also geek famous for her, what's the problem to be solved question that brings focus to many tech issues? Here's my problem. After two eye surgeries, I find even normal light levels dazzling. The LED overheads in my office are painfully bright, inducing significant glare on my matte finish monitors. Add to that, my eyes haven't stabilized enough for my ophthalmologist to write a new lens prescription. Anything small is unreadable, helped somewhat, but not enough by inexpensive drugstore reading glasses. I coped by turning down the brightness on my monitors and turning off the LED overheads. Working in Stygian darkness isn't a solution. Even with an LED backlit gaming rainbow keyboard, which had keycaps too small and dim for me, I couldn't see to type. I'm a good touch typist, but some keys such as function weren't taught in typing class and I had to use a magnifying glass with built-in LED to find them. My daughter, who works with me, took pity. She found two products on Amazon that have greatly enhanced my life. First, shade magic gray magnetic light filtering diffusers reduce the intensity of my office's overhead LEDs. Thanks to those, I'm able to turn the lights on and see what's on my desk. They're $22.99 for a pair that fit two by four ceiling fixtures. Amazon offers a wide variety of filter materials, including clouds and seascapes, if you want something more than effective, but boring gray. Second, and delightfully, she found a brightly backlit full-size keyboard with large well-spaced keys and big print keycaps. It has a 10 key number pad, worked plug-and-play on both my new Mac mini M2 and Linux Mint system. I really like its keystroke action that has a bit of knuckle softening spring before hitting bottom. One other nice feature is very noticeable bumps on the F and J keys touch typists use to feel their hands are in the home position. I took pictures of the J key on my new keyboard and a well-used white Mac one. It was really difficult, but not impossible to see the difference that's so easy to feel. But here's a hint, clean your keyboards. The macro close-up of even my weak old new one wasn't pretty, and the old white Mac keyboard was just gross. I'm sparing Allison and her readers by not sending those picks for her show notes, but I'm sending one with both keyboards together to give an idea of the benefits of the larger brightly lit keys. The cop-jip-pom large print backlit keyboard is currently $28.99 on Amazon. Turns out there are a large variety of brands and models of large print keyboards. Who knew? This one's simple, works well, and makes me well happy. You'll find links to both the light diffusers and keyboard on Allison's show notes at podfeat.com. Hey George, thanks for this. And it is so delightful to hear your voice again after all this time. That was fantastic. I'm really glad that you found a few solutions that help you out. It's also awesome that the keyboard was less than $30 and makes such a big difference for you. I do wanna point out I feel your pain in trying to photograph the equipment we use every day. They do look positively disgusting up close. When I do use my own images, it takes me forever to get a non-revolting image and to clear enough stuff off my desk to make it not look awful. I don't do a great job of it, but like you say, just getting it not revolting is the goal. It was a very good choice to back up a bit to save us all from seeing the close-up. Have you noticed that it's been a really long time since we've had a new patron for the podfeat podcast? I understand that money's been getting tighter just about everywhere. And if you're feeling the pinch, I don't want you to even think about donating to the show. But if you do have some spare change, I'd really appreciate it if you'd consider going to podfeat.com slash Patreon and finding an amount that shows the appreciation you have for what you learn here. I've asked Steve, also known as Steve, the husband, to come on to talk about a question I've had for a long time about electric vehicles. Welcome to the show, Steve. Well, thanks for having me on your show, Alison. It's a pleasure. Now, we've had this conversation a couple of times and you've done some research. And so I wanted to talk to the audience about this because I think it's an interesting thing to talk through. The mileage you get driving an electric vehicle is highly affected by things like whether you're driving into the wind, whether you're driving up a hill, or if you're towing something. But for some reason, gas-powered vehicles, mileage doesn't seem to be as affected by these environmentalist sort of things. Environmentalist, but you know what I mean, things from the environment as much as electric vehicles. And by the way, we're going to use a term. Gas-powered vehicles are often called internal combustion engines or what electric vehicle people like to call ice cars. So we'll probably say ice more often than saying all those words. So the EVs are highly affected by these environment things and the ice vehicles are not. And I want to understand why. That's a good question. And I had that one for a long time because it just didn't make sense. And as I looked into it, the reason was very counterintuitive and that is EVs are much more energy efficient than ice vehicles, ice cars. Does it make sense, does it? Well, so because they're more efficient than they're get worse because of the environmental factors. Yes, and I know it's counterintuitive, but let me walk through this and please ask as I go, interrupt me. So here when we talk about energy efficiency, a car that has higher energy efficiency, what that means is a greater percentage of the energy stored in the car's power source and for a gasoline car, that's the gas tank and for an EV, it's the battery. So a higher percentage of that car's power is converted to energy that actually makes the car move forward. Okay, so with an EV, a higher percentage of that stored energy actually goes towards go forward, then with a gas car. Right, right. And that's important because the thing, the environmental factors that you spoke of, whether it's wind or driving uphill or towing, those affect the driving force, the back force on the car, the resistance on the car. And the efficiencies we're talking about are countering those forces. They're making the car move against those forces. So it still doesn't quite make sense, I understand, but I'm trying to kind of set the stage here. Okay. Yeah. So in the blog post, we'll have some pictures that really illustrate this, but we'll try to describe it here in words. This is from a Motor Trend article that you found that does describe what's going on. Yeah, and does a really good job at it. With the graphics in particular. Yeah, pictures are worth a thousand words here. So let's talk about an ice vehicle first. And what's amazing, what I learned from this article is how much of the energy in the gas tank is lost when an ice car goes through the combustion process and propels the car forward. When you look at all the different ways energy is lost and by the way, energy is typically lost in these cars, whether it's an EV or an ice car in the form of heat. That's not the only form, but that's the primary form of energy lost. It's just wasted and that energy lost has nothing to do with propelling the car forward. It's independent of how much force the car feels and how hard you have to push the car forward. That's lost in any case. So let me give a good example of where heat is lost. If you can find a traditional incandescent light bulb, do you remember trying to change a light bulb exactly how hot that was when you went to change it? That was because they just lost most of their energy to heat instead of to giving off light. The same thing if you've got an LED light bulb now you can actually grab those when they're lit up because they're not gonna burn you because they aren't losing all that energy to heat. So that's why there's so much better for the environment is because they're losing less energy to heat. So you're saying a gas car versus an EV, now we're gonna talk about how much is lost due to heat? Right, right. Mostly heat, not all, but mostly heat. So in a gas car, let's talk about the total energy stored in the gas tank. Let's just call that 100% regardless of what it is. It's full, it's 100%. When you go forward and you burn that gasoline in the engine, 80% of that energy is lost in the form of heat and other things that are wasted. 80%. 80% and this is an average number and it varies depending on a lot of things but the article does a pretty good job of showing the ranges and the ranges are between 75 and 84%. So I'm just gonna average around 80% for an ice combustion vehicle. So you put a gallon of gas in the car only 20% of that is propelling the car forward. The rest of it's just other losses. Wow. Yeah, and they describe the losses. Most of them are engine losses. There are some parasitic losses, drivetrain losses, auxiliary electricity use but all of those add up to about 80% of loss that is not propelling the car forward. Now you contrast that with an ice vehicle. No, with an EV, with an EV, I mean. I'm sorry, thank you. You can contrast the ice vehicle with an EV electric vehicle. You start with 100% and only about 10% of that total energy is lost in the form of drivetrain and power steering. I'm gonna correct you, 10% is charging loss. Overall, you lose between 31 and 35% according to the graphic you posted. You're looking in the, not quite the right spot because what the, look down below and the thing that that 31 to 35% doesn't show is the regenerative braking effects that add back, that remove some of those losses and put it back into the power available to drive the car forward. When you account for the regenerative braking positive effects, you're only losing about 10% of that total energy because you're regaining some of it back. Oh my gosh. You're right about. I'm glad I read this wrong because if you pay attention to the left side, it says 10% charging loss, 18% drivetrain, you've lost 31 to 35%, but 22% is regained by when you slow down the energy going back into the battery through the regenerative braking system. So you get down to, so you're only losing 10%. Yeah. And again, this is very dependent on the driving conditions. For instance, a trip on the highway doesn't use as much regenerative braking but a trip around town in the city does. So again, this is an average and I think the numbers, the range they give is still pretty low or narrow, only about 87 to 91, I shouldn't say only. A total of 87 to 91% of that energy is used, meaning only about 13 to 9% is wasted and we'll call it an average of 10. So on the ICE vehicle, we're only using 20% to propel the car forward, 20% efficiency and on the EV, it's 90% efficient. Right. That's pretty dramatic. It's a factor of eight, 10% to 80%, right? Right, right. So why is this important though? Why does an EV take a larger hit? Well, the reason is by the- I mean from the environmental stuff. From the environmental impacts on mileage. And the reason is those environmental effects only impact the fuel that is used towards propelling the car forward. All of those wasted factors, which is 80% for the ICE vehicle and 10% for the EV, those wasted factors are not affected by the environmental- Because they're already gone. They're gone. They're just not in any equation. They're independent of the environmental conditions. They happen one way or the other. It's only the forces that push back on the car as it's being propelled forward by its energy source that is affected. So that's 90% of the energy of an EV is affected by those forces. And only 20% of that energy of an ICE car is affected by those forces. So let me see- So the ICE car doesn't feel it as much. It's wasting so much. It's got a lot to give. It's like you've got a leak in the gas tank for 80% of it to start with. And it's only affecting that last 20%. Right, but what you see as a consumer when you're burning fuel is the 100%. Whether it's wasted or it's going to propel the car forward. You see the, and so with an ICE vehicle, 20% is impacted, but when you group it with the 80%, that's not very much because the 80% is not. The amount of drag, let's say on a vehicle because you're going into the wind, let's assume we got two vehicles with the exact same form factor. One is an ICE vehicle and one is an EV. The amount of drag pushing back on the car, keeping it from going forward is exactly the same. But it's only affecting 20% of the fuel in the ICE vehicle and it's affecting 90% of the fuel, if you will, in an EV. Right, so because an EV is so much more efficient, it takes a bigger hit when it comes to those forces pushing back on the car. It takes a bigger hit from the total energy storage that it has to provide. A 90% hit versus a 20% hit on the ICE vehicle. And that's because it's so much more, the EV is so much more efficient. It just converts much more of the energy. And if you think about it as strange, that means 80% of that gas tank is just not never used to move the car forward, even though it's necessary for as part of the combustion process, it's got to occur, but it doesn't really go towards something useful. It goes towards hitting that engine block up and you know how hot those can get. Well, it's also busy putting pollutants into the air helping cause climate change. It's got a lot of work it's doing with that. There are some other things, yeah, it's working towards, but the one you see most is the heat, I would say as a moment. As a loss, yeah. So the effect of this is that when you drive an EV in some ways, it behooves you to be more intentional and to pay attention to things. For example, Steve, when we're driving on a long road trip you like to get that road trip done over with as quickly as possible, right? Most of the time. I mean, especially on a long boring road, we go up to Fresno to see Steve's parents. There can't be a more boring road to go up there, but so you like to drive pretty quickly to get things done, but you've actually started to change your driving habits based on what you're seeing in our cars, in our EVs. Right, now that we both own and drive EVs, it has, I have modified my driving and that's because I do wanna get a little more efficiency and range out of our charge of the battery. And one of the best ways to do that as a driver is to not drive as fast, especially on the highway. And the reason is the force or drag that your car experiences when you speed up goes as the velocity squared. So as you increase your speed, the drag is going up much quicker. It's a square of the speed. So the, and what that means is increasing your speed or let's say, yeah, increasing it say from 55 to 60, that'll have an impact on your range, but increasing it from 75 to 80 will have a much larger impact. Those five mile an hour extra, five extra miles per hour will impact your range much more significantly because of this squared law. So what does that mean? Stay away from the higher speeds. I used to drive in the, I'll say push an 80 for much of that straight long trip up the I-5 and that's a killer for an EV with that huge drag because it's so efficient and it's hitting the mileage much more. So I've knocked that down 10 miles an hour roughly. Yeah. Now it's interesting that you've done that and I don't wanna talk you out of that because we're also safer if you're driving more slowly. But we don't have any trouble getting to Fresno on the way we charge. We leave our house at say 10 in the morning, we like to stop after a couple hours, we'll eat a sandwich in the car and the time we take to eat a sandwich more than gets us to Fresno with maybe 20 minutes. We basically can't eat and hit the restroom in the time that we've gained more than enough mileage to keep going. Right, it's not a matter of me. It just feels wasteful, right? It feels, yeah, I noticed the waste, I guess is the way to put it and I'm more conscious of it and it has, maybe subconsciously, maybe consciously affected my driving habits. Yeah, that's not the worst thing. It's no problem for us with a stop which we'd make anyway, going up to Fresno to recharge and usually that stop is we need longer to eat than we need to charge our car. Yeah, and that's not even waiting for somebody to make us lunch, we pack a lunch because it's easier and faster. Right. So the other thing that I like about the Tesla and it doesn't really, it's just for fun, it's just for education, you can watch your energy chart. So there's a graph you can pull up where you can see whether what your average range is gonna be and you can see how it's affected. So we go over a hill called the Grapevine and when you go over the Grapevine. Pretty significant hill. Yeah, how high is that? I think it peaks around 4,500 feet maybe. Yeah, so when we go over that, you can see our basically we're only gonna be able to go like another eight miles. I mean, it just drops like a stone and then when you start going down, it's like, yeah, you can go a thousand miles now because we're going downhill and it's regenerative braking is kicking in sometimes and you should basically you can go forever if you're coasting down a hill. Yeah, that graph is pretty good. And it does more than just show your instantaneous mileage which will vary greatly depending on the conditions. But it also projects forward. If you were to maintain your driving habits as you've been doing, it'll project how far you will get with a much better estimate than just the actual number next to the odometer does. Right, right. Well, every odometer is a lie. EVs maybe a lie more than ever, more than any. But so we've talked about the drag from wind, towing, same kind of thing? No, well, same kind of thing. It is true that an EV is gonna take a bigger hit than a nice vehicle with towing, but I don't see an easy way around that one. I don't know of it other than also reducing your speed. But for a given speed, you're gonna tow or you're not gonna tow and the weight of that, whatever you're towing is obviously a large factor. But again, it's because it's affecting 80% of your tank, if you will, 90% of your tank instead of 20% of your tank. For an EV, yeah. And so in actuality, an EV is not the best vehicle to use to tow large packages with. Well, I tell you what, if you're towing a boat, don't fill the gas tanks on the boat before you start towing it. Fill them at the other end as you're towing all that weight, right? Yeah, reduce the weight. I don't know how much that matters on a boat, but in any case, it's something, you do wanna minimize weight if you can. And some people just, they've towed successfully with EVs, but you have to more carefully plan your charging route. Intentional, just being intentional and paying attention. Yes. You can't just go, okay, I know I've got a 300, my car's supposed to go 310 miles. What's going to go 310 miles if it was towing something or if I was into a tough head wound all the way? No doubt, yeah. Cause towing, you've got a couple hits, you've got the weight, more weight and drag, and you also have more air resistance behind the car pushing, having to push wind. So the drag's even worse. So we've talked about those factors, but what about cold temperatures? I hear about cold temperatures a lot with electric vehicles being a problem. Yeah, so that's a little different than the factors we're talking about here because these other factors affect both, EVs and ICE vehicles. They just affect EVs more. It's kind of an efficiency impact. The cold doesn't really affect ICE vehicles at all. And it does affect electric vehicles because batteries do not operate well or as well at cold temperatures. Now, Tesla has done a good job at conditioning their batteries and providing thermal management of the batteries. Probably the best in class of all the EVs out there, at least from what I've read and heard. So they can help minimize that impact, but there are definitely impacts even with Tesla's thermal management to range that you can achieve with the battery and cold temperature. So the problem is that battery chemistry slows down as the temperature goes down. You can actually get it cold enough that a battery won't work at all. The battery in your cell phone won't work at all if it gets cold enough. It's just the chemistry works that way. The molecules stop bouncing around, right? So when you say they do thermal management or conditioning, what do you mean that Tesla does to that battery? This is on your way to a charger, correct? Both on your way to a charger and while you're charging. And by the way, this conditioning generally, when it's hot out would be to cool the battery, literally cool it. Oh, okay. And they also heat the battery if it's too cool. So they actually try to put the system tries to put the battery in a range that it likes to operate in, a temperature range. So... I'm kind of grinning right now because I'm realizing there's conditions under which the battery is too cold because the car is not generating much heat, right? Because there's not much loss. So there's not a nice hot engine block to heat up your battery. It's actually gonna get cold under cold temperatures. Right, right. So Tesla does as good of a job as they can to condition that, get it right at the right temperature. By the way, doing that costs energy, right? Yeah, because you gotta... Not only is the... Spitting heat out. Right, or maybe cooling. You know, I have to think, I have to go back and check where they actually can cool the battery, but at least they can blow air on it. I don't know if they have any other active cooling systems. They may have a liquid cooling system. Oh, okay, so it's self-contained? Yeah, I think they do, but I'm not positive on that. I do believe though that they handle both the high and the low temperature conditions and try to bring it to the preferred range. And so you're taking a hit by having to power the thermal management system, whether it's heating or cooling, and you're taking a hit because the battery's not in its nice range. I mean, Tesla system can try to push it as best they can to the proper range, but often it's not achieved. By range, you mean temperature. Temperature range. Right. And if it's outside of that range or at the edge, it's still not gonna perform as well as if it's optimally at the optimal temperature. One of the ways we see this conditioning is in the Tesla app on the navigation, you tell it, okay, I wanna charge at this charging station, or you tell it your destination, it says, hey, if you stop for 10 minutes at this one and 10 minutes at that one, you'll get there with plenty of charge. And when you'd say, okay, that's what I'm gonna do, it then knows, okay, at this distance, I'm gonna need to have the battery ready to charge and it'll actually start conditioning the battery. Get a little notifications as I'm conditioning the battery now. So that's good. And you can hear that often, whether it's probably a heat pump or some sort of fan kicking in, it's harder to hear when you're actually driving, but when you come to a stop and you're pulling in or going slowly approaching the supercharger, you can definitely hear that. Yeah, I don't want this to be all a Tesla ad, but at risk of doing that, Tesla has done a lot of things to make the batteries more efficient and make this charging more efficient as he's talking about. And the result is that when you look at the distance per kilowatt, kilowatt hour, kilowatt hour. Kilowatt hour. I can never get this straight. If you look at the distance a Tesla can go per kilowatt hour of battery, it's much higher than a lot of the other EVs. Is that right? That's right. And a lot of that is in their motor design. Probably a combination of the battery, thermal management and the motors being very efficient. Right, right. It's the entire drivetrain, power and drivetrain combo that's well integrated, designed and integrated. My hope is that as the other manufacturers get better at doing this and get more time under the belts to catch up to Tesla, that they'll be able to be more efficient too. I'm a big, I'm super happy that Ford has come out with the Ford Lightning, Chris Ashley and his Ford Lightning, we love his car, really, really cool that that exists. But his vehicle is much, much heavier than ours, significantly heavier than ours. But he has a battery that's twice the size of ours with the same mileage. And that isn't all taken into account with just the weight of that vehicle. It is not as efficient, right? Right, because you'd think, I don't know if this actually works mathematically, but you'd think that with a needing a battery twice as heavy to get the same range might equate to maybe the weight of the vehicle being twice as much, but I don't know who it is. No, it wasn't when we first looked at it. It's maybe 50% more. And you said twice the weight of the battery, you meant twice the capacity of the battery in that. I'm sorry, twice the capacity of the battery, right? Yeah, so I just, I'm not, well, I'm probably a bit of a Tesla fan girl, but I really want electric vehicles to be everywhere. All cars, electric vehicles, I want all these gas cars to get off the road and let's fix the environment, do what we can to fix the environment. So I really do, I'm sincere when I say, I hope that they catch up and pass Tesla and give Tesla, do better than Tesla what they're doing to increase efficiencies. And I don't want this to come off as a negative to EVs, the fact that so much is lost in terms of energy due to environmental effects, because EV drivers just kind of learn how to work around this. It's really not a big deal to us, but I think it is to novices or people who don't drive an EV or aren't used to driving an EV. These kind of sound scary. And it's not like a headwind's gonna make it cut in half. Or going from 75 to 85 miles an hour is gonna cut it in half. It just cuts it down some, but it's something you do notice it. It's noticeable, but not huge. Right, and you learn to work around it, whether that be you make sure you are tracking your energy use or you've planned out your route so you know how far you can get to the next stop. All those things almost become second nature after a little while. Rod Simmons. And Tesla has a great app for, I mean, their in-car system is very good about if you've navigated to a destination showing you the optimal route and showing you where and how often you should charge, which may not be sitting at one place for a long period. It may be a couple small stops. Because it's more efficient that way to charge. Rather than one sitting. Before, but we'll say it again, the charge curve is pretty much linear. You sit there waiting for the X length of time, you'll gain Y amount of charge. But when you get up to about 65, 70% all batteries, your cell phone, any battery like that, it's gonna roll off and take longer and longer and longer to get that last 30% charge. So when you do navigate with the Tesla app, it'll say stop here for 10 minutes and stop there for 10 minutes. We used to go, okay, let's sit here and wait till it's 100%, we'd be sitting there for an hour. And then we'd still have to stop to top up off if we were going far enough. But if you do a couple of smaller charges and you know what, it's probably good for you to get up, walk around, weight yourself up, grab a Coke, whatever, input, output, get all that done and get back on the road. And you can do it in a short length of time with doing it that way. Right, and that's not to say that all road trips require many frequent stops. For example, when we drive to Fresno, that's a four hour drive without stops. We end up making one stop and that's fine and it's not a long one. It can be as little as 20 minutes. If you want a little more charge when you arrive at your destination, maybe a little longer than that. Yeah, actually, I think 20 does it, but we take longer to eat a sandwich and go to the bathroom then. Right. And we always stopped in Bakersfield for a sandwich or something. We aren't doing anything different to do ours. I'm not one who can drive four hours without a stop. Yeah, there's a lot of people who claim to be able to do that. I did want to say one more thing about the slowing the car down. Rod Simmons was our, is it Sensei? They are our mentor when we first got our Teslas and he likes to run it down to the wire and he talked about driving to his mom's house and it said, he was going 75 miles an hour and it said, ooh. Yeah, the car goes, you're gonna need to slow down a little bit because you're not gonna make it. So he's like, okay, I'll get down to 65 and it goes, yeah, you're still gonna be a little bit short. And by the time he was rolling in, he was driving like 35 miles an hour to make it into the end. I mean, he goes in with four electrons left. Yeah, we had one incident like that. I don't know if you remember when we were coming back from Fresno, we were coming, I think it was, maybe it was Vegas, but we were coming through either Bakers, no, it wasn't Bakersfield, it was Bishop. No. What is the, I think we're coming back from Vegas. Yeah, the big thermometer one. Right, right. In any case, we did get that warning that you need to slow down to make your next destination. And I think I was able to get it just down to 55 and still make it. And I think it turned out to be okay, but because it was when we were going up the hill and then we were gonna be going down again, we were going over a little mountain range there and it turned out to be fine, but it was going, ooh, I don't know if you're gonna make this. Because it didn't know, I guess, for some reason it didn't know we were gonna go downhill and we were okay, but nothing like what Rod does. Rod's nuts, he pushes it to the edge. Yes, no doubt. All right, well, I'm gonna cut us off here. This is fun. I enjoyed learning about this from you and I think you enjoyed learning about it from Motor Trend. Like I said, the images, Steve will have them included in a blog post so you can look at them and to read the Motor Trend article. So if people had questions for you, Steve, is there a way they can get in contact with you? Yeah, I would say the three, well, two methods to contact me which would be on Twitter at SP Sheridan or on Mastodon at SP Sheridan at astrodon.com and then you can follow me on YouTube at SP Sheridan or Steve Sheridan. And of course you're in our Slack at podfeed.com slash slack. You can talk there too. Of course I am. Everything good ends with podfeed. Starts with podfeed. Try to get it right. All right, thanks. It starts and ends. Thanks for coming on, Steve. This was perfect. My pleasure. Until next time. Well, that is going to wind us up for this week. 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